Economic headwinds or bias behind eclipse of NZ’s TV news?

NZ television stars Patrick Gower, Samantha Hayes and Ryan Bridge are likely to lose their jobs. Picture: Warner Brothers Discovery.

This has not been the most wonderful of weeks for anybody working in the news business in New Zealand.

Certainly, it hasn’t been the best one for Kiwi journalists casting about for new career opportunities, either — although possibly it has been something of a useful moment for a spot of occupational soul-searching.

The local media industry here has just taken a double-wallop with two of the country’s main television news outlets announcing on Wednesday that they are pulling the studio plug on a swathe of current affairs shows and shedding hundreds of editorial workers.

In the case of one, the Newshub news service, the whole operation — including its website — will cease in early July, leaving 300 editorial staff out of work.

Newshub’s state-owned rival, TVNZ, confirmed it will also be ending a number of its flagship current affairs shows, resulting in another 68 redundancies.

The economic headwinds currently buffeting New Zealand and much of the global media market have understandably been pressed into service as an explanation.

The business turbulence had been severe “and the bounce-back has not materialised as expected,” said James Gibbons, the president of Warner Bros. Discovery and the owner of Newshub.

Advertising had just experienced a 14.3 per cent drop, the largest annual decline in 30 years, he added.

But other year-on-year numbers might have also been worth considering, such as the academic survey showing that Kiwis’ faith in news providers had tumbled again for the fifth straight year.

The Trust in News survey, which is run by the AUT University’s Centre for Journalism Media and Democracy and uses a similar methodology by the news agency Reuters, found that respondents who actively went out of their way to avoid the news “to some extent” had grown from 69 per cent to three-quarters of the population in just the last year alone.

In terms of those who did follow the type of news shows in New Zealand that have now been permanent canned, the news was just as bad. Only one-third of the 1033 respondents even believed what they saw, down from 42 per cent in 2023.

All in all, the local eclipse of television news — which arrived in New Zealand in 1963, a couple of years after Four Corners debuted on the ABC — looked as vivid as the one that just appeared in the skies over the North America.

Asked why they shunned traditional news sources, for instance, some talked in general terms about the general ugliness of the news selection, including its consequent effect on mental health.

In the case of broadcast news, this can simply be seen as mirroring the migration of viewers everywhere away from the old broadcast models. This shift has particularly affected cable subscriptions and free-to-air broadcast news. Streaming services and on-demand viewing, neither of which give much play to news headlines, are the order of the viewing day.

But at least part of the story in New Zealand has also been what survey respondents repeatedly described “political bias and opinion masquerading as news”.

Such has been the escalation of the trend that probably first started in coverage of the American presidential campaign of the late 1990s when cable news channels in the United States decided that people weren’t watching their offerings so much to learn anything but mostly to have their existing views reinforced. In New Zealand, this has meant a generally “woke” diet of offerings, whether the news has to do with the Middle East, Covid, race relations or the question of biological men competing in women’s sports.

America is huge enough to deal with this by offering a variety of different operations: here a conservative outlet, here a more liberal one. But the market in New Zealand, smaller in population than Sydney, is simply too tiny to accommodate this sort of diversity, leaving punters with the choice of continuing to watch or switching off.

Or so an outsider might at least partly conclude in light of the latest news. Asked if he had anything to say to the those who claimed New Zealand latest media woes are a case of “go woke, go broke”, Newshub’s best-known frontman, Patrick Gower, said such critics could “get stuffed”.

Gower said the closures needed to be viewed primarily as a tragedy for “the millions of other Kiwis that I know that trust me and trust my colleagues”.

No, not a wonderful week at all.

• David Cohen is a Wellington journalist and author.